by Louisa Trent
Society would not make donations to a known slut. Contributions would dry up, and the orphans would remain in overcrowded conditions. I could not let that happen.
“If this was only another business proposition to you, madam, so be it. But I thought you felt something real with me. And that means something to me. I cannot understand it myself, but it does. There, I said it. Do not be so cruel as to put me aside. Tell me your name! I insist.”
I took a deep breath. “I cannot. Know this much – I am not who I represented myself as being, sir.”
“I told you – I know the widow routine was just a front.”
“Yes, that is correct. But there is more, and I am not at liberty to explain further.”
“If you are with another man…even men…it makes no difference to me. You are a prostitute, not a vestal virgin. Your chasteness would be a ridiculous expectation. I shall wait until you finish up with your previous commitments. Even with your cunt still wet from their leavings…even with your ass seeping their semen…seek me out and I will take you on, support you.”
Cringing at that gritty description, I forced out:
“Good evening to you, sir.”
Lifting his hand, he allowed me to depart, and I scurried away before I agreed that yes, we did have something in common and it appeared to be want of the same brand of tawdry carnality.
Chapter Eight
During my escape, I lamented the dull course my life had taken...until this evening.
Not to be picky, but I did take exception to Mr. Osborn’s representation of me in newsprint. As a small point of correction, in an article of his, he wrote I had willingly forsaken my life…or some other self-sacrificing notion…for the sake of poor orphans.
I had not. There had been no specific altruistic intention on my part. Rather, I had fallen into charity work while looking for something to do.
In my late girlhood and early twenties, I had tried the idle life of a wealthy society ingénue– needlepoint and horses and sailing yachts off the rocky coast of Newport Rhode Island, done to while away the empty hours until making the rounds at various husband-hunting expeditions. I never did find anyone suitable. Then, surprisingly, a little over two years ago, I thought perhaps I had found someone, a self-made merchant:
Mr. James Cornell.
As it turned out, my short-lived suitor – two chaperoned visits to the front parlor – loved another without even realizing he did. Dense man.
I knew. That his heart was already taken was obvious to me right from the beginning of our so-called courtship. I had never been in love but I did recognize the condition in others. My parents’ influence on me, I guess. My mother and father had remained utterly besotted with one another until their untimely deaths…
At any rate…common courtesy demanded I tell Mr. Cornell of his heart’s prior involvement with another before he mistakenly committed himself to me.
Yes, another bug dropped in a receptive ear.
After doing so, I nicely let him off the hook. Releasing him from what was little more than a lukewarm verbal agreement to get to know one another better had simply been the right thing to do.
Just last week, I ran into James Cornell on the street. Accompanying him was his wife, the ever-bubbly Daisy, six-months gone with their first child. Regardless, she continued on as his helpmate in the antique business to which they were mutually dedicated.
I envied them their commitment. A boring life was one without a sense of purpose.
Upon realizing the truth of that old adage, I gave up prowling for a husband and threw myself into charitable causes, especially the children’s Asylum. Not a selfless move. My involvement was just as much for my sake as it was theirs. Now, I only socialized in the performance of my obligations there.
At my advanced age and lack of marital prospects, I had to do something. Being a recluse required so little time.
So what, I was alone in a world made for couples?
The role of uninvolved observer suited me. God knows, I enjoyed people-watching more than I enjoyed their actual company. Fate, I suppose.
Clearly, fate smiled on me here. I was able to leave the anteroom unobserved, all the guests having departed for the evening’s entertainment in the library – three vocalists accompanied on the Steinway by Mr. Vincente Lucia, a world-renowned Italian pianist who just happened to be in town this week on tour. Our organization cajoled him into performing.
Still, escaping the mansion entirely unscathed was not to be. My luck failed to hold to that degree. Someone I knew did see me. As I closed in on the door adjacent to the anteroom, my cloak drawn tightly around me to hide the dreadful state of my wardrobe, I met the reporter who fascinated me and before whom I had made the usual fool of myself socially:
Nathaniel Osborn.
After our interview for his newspaper, where I had been professional and poised in articulating my cause, I had reverted. When the conversation veered to me personally, I turned back into my bumbling self. I could not get a word out for all my stammering.
My heartthrob must not see me now, not like this, not after what I had done, and still sticky with a stranger’s leavings, my coiffeur a dreadful sight!
I detoured, heading toward the same potted plant again, my steps slow, plodding, heavy after my thrice initiation to carnality.
The swiftness of his approach foiled that maneuver.
He gave a formal bow. “Good evening, Miss Malone.”
I stopped in my tracks, and smiled. Easily. For all that I had just been with another man in a room not twenty feet from here, intimately with another man, naked with another man, his ejaculate rolling down the inside of my thighs.
“Mr. Osborn,” I said, relaxed as can be despite all that.
“I tried to have a word with you all evening, Miss Malone. I even searched you out. Numerous times.”
After that declaration, I ordinarily would have been out of breath and blinking like mad. Nerves always did me in, threatened to strangle me while simultaneously tearing-up my eyes.
Not now. Now, I said dry-eyed and evenly, “You did? You went looking for me?”
“Yes. But you seemed to have disappeared for a spell.” He paused, cocked his head, scanned my face expectantly, as if he were waiting to be filled in on what I had done during that lapse in time.
As an affront to decorum had occurred during that lapse, I said nothing.
Socially inept did not mean I was a goody-two-shoe. As a bonifide cynic, I understood full well Mr. Osborn’s reporting occupation depended upon his finding juicy leads for society page stories. Scandalous articles sold newspapers.
He might be my heartthrob but I was not about to let myself be used for his career advancement.
“My, but roses are blooming in your cheeks,” he said, jaw still tilted at me. “Doing some strenuous activity, were you, during your extended absence?”
Yes, sordidly losing my virginity in the back room to a brash cad who mistook me for a whore. That little confession would sell scads of Boston Globes…
“Strenuous activity? Who me?” I smiled cheerfully. “Goodness, no, Mr. Osborn. I simply retired upstairs to rest. A bit of malaise.”
“Nothing serious?”
I tapped my forehead, prompting a strand of knotted hair to sweep across my nose.
I brushed it away. “Megrims, I fear.”
“I did wonder over your early leave-taking.”
“Quite right. I am going home prematurely. I never get headaches, you see. And this one has set me back, I fear.”
Lord, but I was becoming proficient at lying. And to a man I cared for, and whose surprising attentions made me deliriously happy. Was this poise in the face of possible calamity what came of losing one’s virginity to a charming stranger?
Making up an alibi came so easily, I even embellished it, not a sign of my tied tongue anywhere. “I felt rather woozy of a sudden and so I availed myself of our host’s retreat upstairs.”
The WC, in o
ther words, something I would never say to Nathaniel Osborne but did not mind saying at all to the stranger whose side I had just left. There was little I had left undone with him, a greater amount left unsaid…including my name.
“But how observant you are, Mr. Osborn, to notice all my comings and goings,” I gushed. “The talent must benefit your reporting duties. Noticing variation in routines, that is.”
Heavens! As if I had not a shy bone in my body, I was actually making conversation – meaningless small talk – with a man who attracted me. Was illicit fornication a cure for bashfulness? Was having a nameless man’s cock inside me a remedy for social clumsiness?
“I am not observant of everyone, Miss Malone. Only those who interest me. You interest me Miss Malone, and so I notice everything about you. For example – you have recently been tearful. Have you been crying, Miss Malone? Has the plight of poor orphan children been too heavy for you to shoulder this evening?” Reaching out, he gently brushed my cheek.
Tears cried over a stranger – were they still flowing down my face?
Normally, a loss of control in public would have embarrassed me no end. Not now. Not after losing my virginity. Being naked with a complete stranger had managed to remove all sense of shame from my character. Could a total lack of remorse be far behind?
“It was an emotional evening,” I replied, evasively.
The truth would have squelched his interest in me, disgust replacing it. Apart from that, an ambitious staff writer might not be above reporting innuendos.
Mr. Osborn?
Far too noble. Still, the cynic in me was wary.
“I was born with all the advantages,” he said with a thoughtfulness I found utterly endearing. “Never went without a meal or a warm bed or devoted parents to tuck me in at night. I am who I am because of them and my assurance of their love, no matter what. I cannot imagine how I might have turned out without that assurance.”
I could easily imagine it. The endearing reporter might have been a thief, a pickpocket, a con artist. The kind of dangerous person one would not wish to run into in a dark and deserted alley…
That was the background of the charming man who had taken my virginity. He belonged to Boston’s hidden criminal element while Nathaniel Osborn was an upstanding pillar of the community.
“I would like to see you again, Miss Malone.”
“I have sworn off granting interviews for a while.”
No longer would I see myself portrayed as a saint in articles. Not because of the basic dishonesty inherent in those stories, but because they were intolerably condescending to a mature woman with a sexual appetite. By society’s double standards, I was no longer nice. In my estimation, I had never been nice – I had been human, with the same foibles as everyone else. And now those foibles included an insatiable curiosity…and appetite…for dark carnality. I would never be a virginal bride dressed demurely in a white lace nightgown on her wedding night. If ever I had one of those, I would go to the marital bed naked, thighs spread, eager to be roughly taken. Possibly tied in leather restraints to the headboard…
Thankfully, Mr. Osborn was unable to read my naughty mind. What a scoop for his newspaper that would make – formerly nice spinster turns raging sex maniac.
The conman I had just left would not think my mind naughty. Rather, he would applaud my randy thoughts.
“Not for an interview, Miss Malone,” the reporter said. “I would like to see you to get to know you better on a personal level.”
On a personal level, I had just coupled with a complete stranger whose breath smelled of hard spirits. I, a Temperance advocate, had allowed his intoxicating tongue halfway down my throat. Indeed, whiskey might now scent each word of my conversation. My gown was ripped to tatters from the expert application of this same man’s pocketknife. His semen drained out of my buttocks, the spewing of two carnal engagements in rapid succession. The third encounter might produce a child. His hands had been all over my naked body, between my legs, on my breasts, pinching my nipples. Not only did I not know his name, I thought his unsavory background might include the very worst sort of illegal activity. He wore the clothing of a conservative gentleman, he spoke with a cultured gentleman’s refined diction, he conducted himself as a courtly gentleman well-versed in social etiquette, but he was no gentleman. He was a fraud.
And I had been more authentic with him than with anyone else.
“Yes,” I said to the floor, a modest lowering of my gaze. “Getting to know you better would be most agreeable, Mr. Osborn. No calling card, necessary. The start of the weekend next, perhaps? You will find me at home to receive you then. An evening visit…if you would be so kind.
The stranger was not kind. And yet he drew me still.
I curtsied to my soon-to-be gentleman caller, and the bob sent my unsupported breasts to shifting under my cape. Would the observant Mr. Osborn notice?
Hardly. A true gentleman, Mr. Osborn’s gaze remained correctly fixed at my eye-level.
Not so the stranger. His sights had taken in all of me, even brazenly peering inside my buttocks where his semen had tagged me.
No blush for me. My face positively burned.
“Are you running a fever, Miss Malone?”
I shook my head, even as I instinctively loosened my buttocks, as if for the penetration of a long and thick cock, a stranger’s cock.
“I must leave,” I hastily groaned.
Giving my new suitor no opportunity to say or do more, out the front door I raced for my carriage, waiting in attendance at the curb.
“Take me home, please, Arthur,” I instructed my driver.
Upon my arrival, I sprang down the carriage stairs all on my own, a painful reminder of how I spent the majority of the soiree dogging me as I bounded through the entrance of my Jamaica Plain home. Achy and out sorts, I retreated upstairs to my bedchamber, a distance of some magnitude given my delicate state.
No witnesses to regard my shuffling gait…and ask sensitive questions regarding its origin…I lumbered along the hallway, my recent carnal initiation catching up with me in every uncomfortable step.
“I should sell this old place,” I muttered to myself as I headed for the WC at the end of a corridor. “Six oversized bedchambers are five too many for one person living alone.”
The crushing weight of disloyalty descended.
My parents had loved this estate, had anticipated filling every available nook and cranny with babies. Though each empty room felt like an albatross now, I had enjoyed all the extra space as an only child.
My mouth twisted with indecision. Perhaps, I should hold onto the old place, use the house as a summer residence only. So much cooler near Jamaica Pond than in-town. Then, I could lease elsewhere for the winter. France, perhaps, where attitudes were more…European. Paris was sophisticated, even racy. I could live there quietly, a little garret, a master suite…with an easily convertible dressing room attached for a nursery.
Hang scandal! I longed for a child of my own. I could always buy a husband somewhere down the line for respectability, someone titled, even British. Families over there were always looking to exchange a younger son for money to shingle the castle’s leaky roof…even if the American bride were old and not exactly a virgin.
Once inside the WC, with the door unnecessarily closed and locked, I dropped my clothing to the floor and then walked naked to the tub to draw myself a hot bath. Doing this personal chore would raise no suspicions among the staff. For years, I had been too afraid of my elderly maid tumbling headfirst into the water to call her for assistance. Other than arranging my drab clothing and torturing my hair, both light duty, Irene was carefree for the remainder of the day, to do needlework or bird watch if she chose or…
The full-length mirror caught my attention before I completed the thought.
Bruises blossomed all over my body, the discolored flesh reminders of my escapade, a roadmap of a stranger’s travels, each signpost treasured by me while it lasted. My reflec
tion pleased me – the small curves of my torso and straight lines of my legs. Slight smudges encircling my nipples from his pinching made me smile, not frown.
I had no regrets. Was that so very bad of me?
While the tub finished filling, I went to the sink, swished out my mouth with tap water. Not to sluice the taste of a stranger’s whiskey kisses down the drain, but to signify that life went on.
May a life go on inside me, I thought, placing a careful hand over my belly.
Afterwards, I let that thought go. If it was to be, it was to be, I mused, crawling over the tub’s high side, looking forward to a long soak after my extended bout of carnality.
Pausing, I reconsidered that last.
Penetrated three times in the space of one evening would classify as extended, would it not?
The conversations I overheard amongst society ladies referenced once a month intercourse as usual, and then only in the interest of wifely duty. Anything more was termed excessive…
…and perhaps explained the proliferation of mistresses amongst wealthy and carnally-deprived gentlemen.
Mr. Osborn would call me in a day’s time. Whether or not his visit meant the start of courtship, I meant to live, live, live regardless. I intended to tell him so at the very beginning. I would keep no secrets from him. He would learn I was a woman of experience. And as carnality was part of life, I felt no shame in wanting it to be a part of mine. How I would act on that philosophy remained to be seen. For now, the admission alone proved I had changed.
On the morrow, I decided, sinking beneath the water’s surface, I was bundling up my mourning attire for the ragman. Then, with nothing to wear but the one item I would keep aside, I was taking myself off to the dressmaker for a fitting. A whole new wardrobe was what I required, not a gray or black or even mauve amongst the new gowns, some of which would show cleavage. Not much, for I had so little. And I would order scandalous undergarments with crimson ties. After seeing to all that, then I would go to the orphanage and count the proceeds from this evening’s soiree, delivered there by currier. I remained optimistic about the amount received. If that optimism proved correct, I would then contact an architect.
